Spaced repetition has a natural domain of applicability: information that is systematically organized as an unambiguous key-value mapping with short keys and values. The “Hello, world!” of flashcards is the NATO phonetic alphabet : A → alpha, B → bravo, etc. Similarly, the periodic table can be thought of as defining a collection of mappings: element name ↔ symbol, element name ↔ atomic number, etc. You can just drill these cards and memorize the facts without a prior step of under...

World’s first steel tensile structure at the All-Russia Exposition in 1896, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at Tokyo’s cheap housing and expensive land, the House response to the Senate housing bill, an IED near an Alabama dam, Fervo’s IPO, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items...

This is my entry to this month's Bear Blog Carnival , on the topic of our favourite thing in a niche hobby. Thank you for hosting, Kami! This was a fascinating topic to think about. Alternative Text My favourite typewriter is the one I have: a Royal typewriter, likely decades old, that I found in a charity shop in Edinburgh. I remember seeing the typewriter in the shop window. It was the sixth shop I had been to that day with the obsqure [sic] inquiry "do you have any typewriters?" in the back ...

My Python pet project powers on, package on PyPi published, pyriodic parsing possible! I had to do that. Now, without alliteration, I am happy to inform that Pyriodic Backend, version 0.3.0 has been published to PyPi and is available for download. pyriodic-backend 0.3.0 on PyPI But what is it? Pyriodic Backend is my project aiming at creating a "backend" framework for the small, static websites. I believe that with the renewed interest in going back to the roots of the Internet and creat...

TL;DR: “Private by obscurity” has been dissolved. Internal tools often have layering boundaries that are enforced only by convention. It’s natural to assume a “high trust environment”, where privileged actions are discouraged by obscurity and goodwill instead of hard technical boundaries. Coding agents have dissolved this obscurity, and as a result internal platform engineering now really demands a security mindset. 1 During a recent codebase audit, a coworker and I discovered a...

Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind . At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I was really happy to choose Tailwind. It helped me make a lot of tiny sites! I spent the last week or so migrating a couple of sites away from Tailwind and towards more semantic HTML + vanilla CSS, and it was SO fun and SO interesting, so here are some things I learned! As usual I’m not a fu...

I just got an email from Amazon saying they're finally going to respect robots.txt . Here's the verbatim email I got: We are writing to inform you that starting Monday, June 15, 2026, crawl preferences for Amazonbot will be managed solely through the industry-standard directives. This gives you direct, ongoing control over how Amazonbot accesses your site, rather than relying on manual requests. If you do not implement robots.txt directives by that date, Amazonbot will follo...

In compilers, static single information form (SSI) is a common extension to static single assignment form (SSA). It was introduced by C. Scott Ananian in 1999 in his MS thesis (PDF) 1 . SSI extends your existing SSA intermediate representation by discovering facts from your existing program and reifying them as path-dependent/flow-sensitive IR nodes. That might sound complicated, but at least the basic idea is pretty natural. I talk a little bit about it in What I talk about when I talk a...

A bit over a year ago I wrote How I use LLMs as a staff engineer . Here’s a brief summary of what I used AI for last year: Smart autocomplete with Copilot Short tactical changes in areas I don’t know well (always reviewed by a SME) Writing lots of use-once-and-throwaway research code Asking lots of questions to learn about new topics (e.g. the Unity game engine) Last-resort bugfixes, just in case it can figure it out immediately Big-picture proofreading for long-form English c...

Techniker Krankenkasse topped the Stern and Statista ranking of best companies to work for in Germany 2026 with a score of 85.38 out of 100, leaping from 14th place the year before. The annual survey polled over 20,000 employees across 2,600 companies in 24 industries, generating more than one million individual ratings. This article breaks down the full rankings, industry-level standouts, year-over-year shifts, and what Germany’s current labor market means for job seekers in 2026. Best Com...

Here's an attempt to answer questions I get about why I don't use AI, and any more I could think of that may also arise. I'll try to get into it as honestly as possible, without just falling back on "it sucks and is bad" and leaving it at that. Read more on the site… Here's an attempt to answer questions I get about why I don't use AI, and any more I could think of that may also arise. I'll try to get into it as honestly as possible, without just falling back on "it sucks and is bad" and...

I will update this as new entries are added. A Acemoglu2023 Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity . PublicAffairs, 2023, 9781541702530 . Achen2017 Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government . Princeton University Press, 2017, 9781400888740 . Adelstein2023 Jake Adelstein: The Last Yakuza Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld . Scri...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with RMF, whose blog can be found at baccyflap.com/prs/blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? My name's rmf. My legal name's not terribly har...

I didn’t expect DwarfStar 4 (https://github.com/antirez/ds4) to become so popular so fast. It is clear that there was a need for single-model integration focused local AI experience, and that a few things happened together: the release of a quasi-frontier model that is large and fast enough to change the game of local inference, and the fact that it works extremely well with an extremely asymmetric quants recipe of 2/8 bit, so that 96 or 128GB of RAM are enough to run it. And, of course: all t...

TAIPEI (May 13, 2026) – Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, and Thunder Tiger Corp., one of Taiwan’s leading manufacturers of unmanned surface and aerial systems, announced today a memorandum of understanding to integrate Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software across Thunder Tiger’s unmanned systems portfolio, beginning with unmanned surface vessels (USVs). As a first milestone, Hivemind will serve as the AI pilot on a...

This article was originally drafted in 2024 but I struggled to finish it then. I was stuck wondering if I was just moaning over the past. Recently, Salma and Jo both shared thoughts that gave me the rage and energy to come back to this. Today is the day I finally have the courage to publish. I can’t recall how many times I thought of writing something like this. I thought of riding certain waves inspired by other authors but most times the embarrassment got the best of me. During those w...

Is Bitwarden preparing for a sale? by Jan-Lukas Else Jan-Lukas writes about the warning signs that Bitwarden might be heading for a private equity sale. The irony is that founder built Bitwarden because he didn't trust what happened when LastPass got acquired. Read post ➡ I saw this on the fedi this morning and it made me let out a big sigh. I was an early adopter of Bitwarden, having used it for nearly 10 years at this point, after LastPass were acquired by LogMeIn . If this does come to f...

1) Congratulations to Scott Aaronson for winning the first Trevisan Award. The Trevisan Award is in memory of Luca Trevisan and recognizes expository work in TCS . It is given out by the ACM. The ACM announcement of Scott's award is  here . Scott blogged about winning it  here . 2) When preparing this blog post, I googled Trevisan Award. The first hit I got was  this . That site says the award was for significant research.  Hmmm. My first thought was Scott has, in fact, done significant r...

Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter Telescope, Rubin is designed to study our constantly moving and changing universe in greater detail than ever before. Once every few days for a decade, Rubin will take images of the entire… Source Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin O...

Last week I spent a day at a retreat that brought together several people working in software development to talk about the profession’s future with the rise of agentic programming. The event was help under the Chatham House Rule , so I can’t attribute the comments and stories I heard. (If anyone recognizes themselves, and would like attribution, let me know.) Here are a few tidbits that caught my notebook.  ❄                ❄ One group developed a behavioral clon...

In my recent post I motivated the elimination tree and gave a loose derivation from the cholesky task DAG. I thought it might be nice to visualize the actual tree computation algorithm (without path compression) to help develop intuition on how it represents fill-in in such a compact form. I asked codex to build this visualization which I share below: Open the elimination tree visualization You can step forwards or backwards in the elimination tree calculation. Fill-in entries get colore...

Catch Flakes On Main May 14, 2026 A small Mechanical Habit today: When using not rocket science rule / merge queue, continue to redundantly run the full test suite on main. Maintain an easily accessible list of recent main failures — these are the flaky tests to eradicate. For an example, see the “Flakes” link on https://devhub.tigerbeetle.com Flaky tests are tests that fail intermittently, once in a thousand runs. This might be due to a genuine bug (assump...

Last year I said I'd probably never recommend another Bambu Lab printer again . I still use my P1S, but after Bambu Lab started pushing their always-connected cloud solution as the new default: I blocked the printer from the Internet via my OPNsense Firewall I stopped updating the firmware I locked the printer into Developer mode I deleted Bambu Studio and started using OrcaSlicer I had to do that to keep it under my control, instead of Bambu's. Last year I said I'd probabl...